


Salting the Ruins

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Blood, F/F, Illustrated, historical revisionism and associated dystopias, timey-wimey bs, truly unwise lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m a time traveler!” Aradia shrieks, throwing her hands in the air. She adds, on thought, “And probably immortal, too!”</p><p>The blueblood pauses for a moment in describing the sheer sexual belligerence of her fuckorgans to stare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salting the Ruins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tasbine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tasbine/gifts).



The artifact shows three figures carved in stone. The first is painted violet, like the princes and their banners, and the second is teal, color faded and barely-there after so many thousands of years inside the buried temple. The third figure is rust, ornamented in gold, weapon dripping violet, boots stained teal, and it’s the only figure standing. When the cool-blooded hands holding the artifact smash it full against the wall, making dust of the figures of the redblood’s triumph, Aradia screams.

“What are you _doing?_ ” she shrieks, lunging forward against the guards’ grip. “That was _history_ , that was _priceless_!”

The tealblood across the table, carefully dusting her hands of archaeology, smiles. “Don’t be silly, Ms. Megido,” the tealblood chides, gesturing to one of the orangeblood guards to fetch a broom. “What you found was obviously the work of some local delinquents, don’t you think? Those pressurized pigment cylinders have been getting so popular with the kids, and they’re so talented, I’m not surprised you were confused.”

Aradia could spit, she could breathe fire, and she wrenches an arm forward before the orangebloods snap her shoulders back against the chair. “That was thousands of years old!” she snarls, fury and honest, angry confusion pulling at her features. “It was buried behind a cave-in, I worked for years to excavate it, and you’re telling me it’s _graffiti_?”

The tealblood smiles, pacific and pacifying, and rests her hands on the table, one on top of the other. “Kids these days,” she laughs, one smooth shoulder lifting in the suggestion of a shrug. “They do get everywhere!”

This time, Aradia can’t more than telegraph her intent before two thick hands grip her by the horns and pin her to her seat. Panic begins to pinhole her vision. She sucks in air through her nose, gritting her teeth, and the tealblood leans forward in her seat. Aradia, head thick with animal fear, really wishes she would stop smiling.

“We are both students of history in our own ways, Ms. Megido. You know as well as I that the myths of the redblood warlords are simply that. Myths. Beforus is a bastion of peace. We have never fallen victim to the more… _pugnacious_ tendencies of our neighboring planets.”

The tealblood tucks a neat lock of her hair behind her ear and Aradia’s hindbrain whispers _she will grind your bones to make her bread._ She can’t get enough air into her lungs.

 

“There is no war on Beforus, Ms. Megido. There never has been. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”

One orangeblood guard, eyes vacant and dim, appears in the corner of her narrowing vision. He’s holding a syringe, and the tealblood extends one delicate hand forward. Aradia whispers, “ _Please,”_ but there’s too much sound in her ears and she can’t tell if she’s spoken.

“I suppose it’s no great concern if you’ve forgotten,” she says, standing from her seat. She holds the syringe in a practiced grip.  “The Empress established the Reeducation Department for a reason, after all.”

Aradia’s screams don’t make much noise over the meaty palm clamped over her mouth, and she’s not sure if she’s closed her eyes or if fear has sucked away the last of her vision, but the tealblood is moving towards her and suddenly she’s got a feeling like her nerves have been pulled through her pores, the base of her neck is a single, orange bloom of pain, fear is setting fire to her skin, and a gust of briny wind smacks her full across the face.

Aradia opens her eyes and meets the baffled stare of a redblood, tall as an oak, bedecked in gold, clothes spattered in violet and teal, and says, “Uh oh.”

The tealblood, with her syringe, is gone. Instead, there’s a sea plain littered with coolblooded bodies, the horizon is empty of cities or spires, and Aradia manages a high, strangled, “This is so _cool_ ,” before a redblood warlord runs her through with a pike.

 

 

She wakes up in a cell, and it’s the same gray brick and same damp smell and same blueblood dissident cellmate as the one they threw her in six hours before they smashed her life’s work against a wall.

Sure enough, the blueblood dissident is even still talking about her bulge.

Aradia’s a time traveler.

“I’m a _time traveler_!” she shrieks, throwing her hands in the air. She adds, on thought, “And probably immortal, too!”

The blueblood pauses for a moment in describing the sheer sexual belligerence of her fuckorgans to stare.

Aradia closes her eyes, mentally feels for that fresh, new place of the base of her neck that thrums with fresh, new pain and some fresh, new sense of vastness and power, and winks out of time before Vriska can shut her mouth.

 

 

The first five things Aradia Megido, Time Travelling Archeologist and Queen of All History (pending), learns in the course of her travels are:

_1\. The past is awesome!_

Beforus before her Empress is cruel and bloody and smells like no one’s invented the toilet yet, petty and thick with disease, nasty and brutish and startingly short, and Aradia’s never seen such _life._ She cherishes every snarl, every glower, every open show of aggression or sadness. She marvels at how people act without fear of Reeducators or Stability Officers or the invisible hand of the empress overhanging their lives, how their every word is laced with the kind of emotion (the kind of dissent) that would have them secreted away in the night in her modern age.

Aradia can’t track time with any sort of significance anymore, but she knows it’s something like weeks she’s been travelling, taking notes and sketching pictures and asking every question she ever swallowed down out of fear for her life.

She learns there was a time before the Empress Peixes. She learns there was a republic, and a system of representatives. She learns redbloods were feared for their fierceness in battle and the strength of their minds, and that war, though terrible, was a small part of the world.

In Aradia’s time the grubs and the kids were sequestered, kept from society at large until their initial schoolfeeding had run its course, and in the past Aradia discovers a fondness for children. She tells them stories as she passes through the low cities of the plains, her own present spun into fairytale magic as they chitter brightly around her and pick at the strange fibres of her clothes.

She loves how small they are, how big they seem to think, and in a town by the sea that will someday house millions upon millions, she gets a bit careless. She pulls an old holocube out, and the children are gasping and then someone else is screaming and constables are approaching and this is how Aradia learns that:

_2\. The past is kind of shit!_

 

You know who likes getting hanged for witchcraft? _Nobody!_ Nobody likes getting hanged for witchcraft.

_3\. The cell with the blueblood and the weird smell is home base._

Aradia has heard this troll discuss her history of sexual activity more than is necessary by any system of measure. When Vriska begins to list the names of her conquests, which always begins within five to seven minutes of regeneration, Aradia can mouth along with her, whispering, “ _Tadime, Norray, Einike, and ooh, Kenada, she was a weird one,_ ” in perfect time.

She rarely lingers post-regeneration, but after the hanging she’s more shaken than she’d care to admit, can still feel the burn of the rope around her closing throat, and Vriska is, unfortunately, the most constant thing in her fresh, new life.

“—and not weird in a kinky way, but more weird in a—in a, fuck it was like she was wondering how my sclera would taste every time she looked at me, you know? She was—“

“Why are you in here, anyways?” Aradia asks her, running two knuckles under her jaw. Vriska has never proven herself much of a conversational partner before, but Aradia can still feel the break in her neck. Maybe this iteration will be different. Maybe they will Talk.

Vriska blinks, obviously unused to the sound of anyone’s voice but hers, then grins. “Slagged the Highest Fishbitch within earshot of a princeling. He called in the Stabbers, but I was just trying to pay the woman a compliment, you know?”

Vriska’s grin has grown wider, tipping up at the corners and flashing her teeth. She reeks of smug. Aradia feels her expectations slowly bottom out. “You told him you banged the Empress, didn’t you.”

Vriska wilts, her smile going slack, and she demands, “How did you know that? Did someone tell you? Because it’s true you know, I had her down on all—“

“Okay, this was a mistake!”

_4\. Changes are not saved._

Feferi presses her back against the couch cushions, biting at her lips, swinging one thigh over her lap to straddle her hips, and Aradia will regret losing this. Feferi tastes of salt. She tastes of Aradia’s own blood, pricked from her lips by seatroll teeth, and she tastes of rich, rich wine. Aradia does, too, she’s sure, she can feel it shining in her cheeks, and she lets herself whisper, “I’ll miss you,” into the black tides of Feferi’s hair as her future Empress begins to suck down her neck.

Feferi pauses in her markmaking, just long enough to ask, “Are you leaving again?” before she kisses at Aradia’s collar. Soft lips find her breasts, three fingers tick up her thighs and Feferi whispers, “You never tell me when you go,” into the skin of her throat, whispers, “Or where,” as Aradia bucks up into her hand.

“You never remember,” Aradia manages, between moans, wine thick between her eyes. She’s not quite sure of what she’s saying, but she’s not quite sure she cares. She anchors herself on the long swoops of Feferi’s horns. “You’ve never remembered. Not in all the times you’ve loved me.”

“Could never forget you,” Feferi whispers absently, mind on other things, and Aradia’s grip goes tight around her horns. There’s a nick in the left one, just under her thumb, maybe a year old by Feferi’s reckoning, and Aradia will hate to see it go, come her next visit with Death and Vriska and the reset of all her efforts that inevitably follows. They’d been hiding from the princelings and the guards, that year ago, all the many old men who tried so hard to keep the young heir apparent within their lines of prescribed behavior, who would not perhaps have approved of the vanishing redblood with her bright smile and her knowing laughs and her bulge in the princess’ mouth, and when the cavalreapers had come storming the stairwell, shouting for the princess, Feferi had gone tumbling over a banister before she could get her pants back up. Aradia’s quite fond of that nick, and its semblance of permanence. She likes Feferi, despite the thousand and one reasons she should hate her and hurt her, but she’s young, and they’re both young, and maybe Aradia loves her, somehow. Maybe if she just doesn’t die for a while, she could make something of this.

Which is when, of course, sound explodes and light burns and Feferi is ripped screeching from her chest and, with a great deal shouting about intruders and protecting the princess, some cavalreaper putz puts his sword between Aradia’s ribs.

Aradia hates dying before the invention of gunpowder. The pain always leaves her gasping.

Feferi’s torn herself away from the guards, staining her fine nails rust red as she presses at the hole under Aradia’s breast, screaming at the princelings and the guards between every sob into Aradia’s hair. Right now, as the men edge back and Feferi’s teeth go brilliant and sharp in the light of their lamps, Aradia can see what she’ll become. Terrific and terrifying are born of the same root. Feferi’s kindness is not so far from cruel.

Aradia’s vision is tunneling. Her stomach is sticky with blood and her heart stutters in her chest, too slow between beats. She reaches one hand up, not that she can feel much past the elbow, and glances two fingers under Feferi’s jaw. The screaming cuts out, swallowed down in an instant, and Feferi’s face is all of a sudden all she sees, fat, salty tears peppering her hair.

“It’s ok,” she whispers up, into features she’s having trouble seeing. “It’s not your fault, it’s ok.”

Feferi says something back, something like _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, don’t leave me, don’t go_ , but, hey, that could be her imagination. It’s all fading to black now, the world carefully tucking itself away as breath comes thin and hard-won into her lungs, and Feferi’s words are an indistinct cloud passing over the water.

Aradia thinks she doesn’t ask for a lot, on the whole. She didn’t make Feferi love her, though she could have. She didn’t kill her, either, though she probably should have. She’s played her part, the traveler passing, leaving no footsteps, taking only memories, but this she would like to remain. Feferi, for all that she will become, is beautiful and sharp and has a nick in her horn because she gave Aradia head. Aradia would like to be remembered. She could be owed this.

“Please, Aradia, please, _please, no—“_

That’s her last thought. The lights have gone out. But there’s a princess, still, and she should remember.

_5\. Whatever has happened, however you’ve died, the present is still worse._

Aradia never thought she could hate a museum.

She’s even been here before, when she was young and still lived in the cities, and she remembers fondly the grand statues and murals, the towering, wall-sized carvings preserved since the “dark days” before the Empress’ rule. She’d love it then. She hadn’t known any better then.

Aradia wanders the galleries in grief and growing discontent, wincing at every revision she passes by. Eridan Ampora won his station through trickery and a knife in another man’s ribs, no honor in battle included. Tavros Nitram never once hurt a troll who did not hurt him first. Kanaya Maryam didn’t revolutionize jadeblood hierarchies, she led a fucking revolt, and for her pains she’s been warped and twisted and shoved into archetypes until Aradia’s paced through five halls of historical masterpieces and not found a one without some portrayal of Maryam as the mother, the Madonna, the calm voice of reason above the revolutionary scum. Aradia frowns, and she’s not in the habit of frowning.

In the atrium, in the starlight, there is, of course, the Empress. Aradia stands at the marble base, gazing up the larger-than-life curves of stone, searching for the girl she’d rather started to love in the sculpted features of the woman she’s rather started to hate. It’s beginning to burn in her stomach, how the Empress has twisted the world to fit in her hand. The knowledge that it could have gone another way, terrific and not terrible, burns worse. Aradia has all the power in the world and none of it of use, and it’s like fire and bile climbing up her throat, the certainty that she could fix this, she could fix _all of it,_ if only her changes were saved.

Aradia stares at the face of the Empress, far above her and in stark relief, and wills her to be better, to be the girl she loved and was loved by, not yet cruel, only possessing the potential. She searches her features, the set of her mouth, the curve of her brow, and then her gaze moves up.

There’s a nick in the Empress’ left horn.

_4\. Changes are ~~not~~ sometimes, on rare occasion, saved._

Aradia’s not frowning anymore.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Including a person's name in Vriska's list of sexual conquests is basically how I saw "Thanks, friends, couldn't have written this fic without you."


End file.
